[Spotlight] Greensboro man wins big in poker

Jeremy Perrin is a 38-year-old Greensboro native who just won first place and $250,000 in his first poker tournament early last month. Perrin said he won out of 8,920 people and it only cost him a $365 entry fee.

“I went out to Vegas and played my first- they are called bracelet events, cause when you win, you win a big prize and a World Series of Poker bracelet- so it was the first one I had ever played and I won,” Perrin said in a phone interview on July 30.

Perrin didn’t always have his poker face. He said he started playing poker because he saw his former boss playing it online.

“I quickly realized at that time that I could probably make more doing that than I did at that job, so I went from playing $10 tournaments to playing local poker cash games.”

He said he has been playing poker on and off and until recently he was the vice president of marketing at a water filtration company.

“I quit that because I have an eight-month-old son and it was just taking too much of my time,” Perrin said. “So I decided I would try to go back into poker and be able to take one-week trips at a time and otherwise be home with my son all the time.”

Perrin quit his job and shortly thereafter, he took home a quarter of a million dollars. He said he enjoys the freedom and competition of playing poker.

“I have always been a super competitive person I don’t really like to do anything unless I feel like I have the chance to be the best in it,” he said. “It is just a big difference from corporate America. I like to compete in that environment too, but I don’t like being tied down and having to work so much every week and have no flexibility in my personal life.”

Perrin said he plans to take the money he has won and reinvest it in himself.

“If you are playing poker for a living, the more money you have, the more money you can make,” he said. “I am just putting it back into myself and next up I am going to Cherokee to play a World Series of Poker series of events at the end of this week actually.”